Computer users utilize a variety of application programs for many different purposes, which include producing documents, art, and music; communicating; learning and researching; transacting business; and pursuing recreation. Such application programs are carefully designed to be useful to and usable for what their designers anticipate to be the application programs' typical users. The broad, multidimensional diversity of modern computer users however, makes it increasingly difficult to identify and design application programs for typical users. The diversity of modem users further ensures that many users will diverge significantly from any users identified as typical. As a result, many conventional applications are ill-suited to many of their users, not to mention their potential users.
Some conventional application programs may be tailored, in certain limited senses, to a particular user. First, some conventional application programs utilize different data resources depending on the value of a variable which may be said to be associated with a user. For instance, some programs display a text string in different languages based on the value of a current language variable. As another example, some programs display different times based on the value of a current time zone variable. This approach to tailoring application programs to a user does not affect how a program functions, but rather just which data it presents in a given situation.
Second, some conventional application programs permit a user to set run-time options that specify whether the application program provides certain optional features. For example, some application programs for drawing permit their users to select whether the application program should provide the feature of displaying a grid of lines intended to help the user to align portions of a drawing. This approach to tailoring application programs relies on an explicit command from the user to provide the feature or not provide the feature, which can make tailoring the performance of an application in this way time consuming and frustrating for users, often involving significant trial and error.
Given the limits of conventional approaches to tailoring application programs to particular users, a flexible and extensible system for dynamically generating computer programs and portions thereof, including various types of data artifacts, based upon relevant user information would have significant utility.